Reconnecting with the Unconscious
Today we are going to look at a reconnecting that for most of us will be quite challenging. We will be looking to discover within us the world of dreams, myths and the imagination. We will be looking at rediscovering a well within us that we may not yet know or what we have forgotten deep within.
On Iona there is a wellspring on the northern side of Dun 1. It is called the Well of Eternal Youth. It is associated with St. Brigid of Kildare, a 5th century Irish saint whose mother was Christian and whose father was a Druid priest. She is the saint who straddles the Christian and the pre-Christian. She embodied a devotion to Christ and an honouring of pre-Christian wisdom, especially its reverencing of nature and the healing properties of the earth.
On the island of Iona it was said that Brigid would appear at the Well of Eternal Youth on the summer solstice when darkness does not come fully until after midnight. As the light of day fades and the light of night appears, there is a time between the two – the time of two lights, twilight. For the Celts, twilight opened to them the realm between the known and the unknown; it may be a time of encountering messengers from God; it is also the time that is most cherished as a time of meditation as the moments between day and night both in the evening and the morning offer to us the opportunity to seek for God in the quiet moments before full darkness descends or full light appears once again.
Carl Jung, a Christian psychologist, devoted his life to finding the breath of God, our soul. He believed that wholeness was to be found by coming back into relationship with the unconscious depths of the soul. Wholeness consists of bringing together what has been torn apart, whether that be the conscious and unconscious, the night and the day, the feminine and the masculine, the head and the heart, spirit and matter. Jung saw that we live in what he called “a painful fragmentation.” (Newell, p. 92) We live in a division of parts. We have separated what God has joined together, the oneness of the universe. Jung also noted that the universe unfolds through paired opposites: sun is followed by moon, day is followed by night, and spring is followed by autumn. Yet, we often live in the day and know little of the night. We are dominated by masculine or feminine energies or intuitions and ignore the other. We use our minds but desert our intuition. We live fragmented lives.
Jung distinguishes between what he calls moonlike consciousness and sunlike consciousness. The world looks different when we walk by the light of the moon. Jung believes we need both ways of seeing. While the sun makes everything distinct and separate, the moon blends things together and allows us to ponder the oneness of the world.
Jung sees the work of the Spirit of God as the bringing together of what we so often see as opposites. The Spirit leads us to communion – a word that is derived from the Latin communis, meaning “one with.” To be born of the Spirit is to remember our oneness with each other, with the earth, and with those who seem most different – even threateningly different – from us. Jung also believed that in the unconscious the opposites in our life lie side by side. It is only in our conscious world that there is separation. When we recognize the separations we find in our consciousness, we can begin to seek for ways of seeing the world that will allow us to bring back into communion what has been torn apart in our lives. Reconnecting with the Unconscious is an invitation to discover again the oneness that God wants us to find.
The American writer Ken Wilber speaks of a threefold journey toward wholeness. We are born in a world of undifferentiated oneness. At birth we make no distinction between ourselves and our mothers and everything else around us. It is all one. Then the ego begins to develop. Wilber calls this essential second stage differentiation. We distinguish between ourselves and our environment. Consciousness of the self has been born. This in and of itself is not a problem but our Western culture causes us to become stuck here. We define ourselves in terms of our separateness, our ego or the ego of our nation or religion. We often fail to move toward the third stage of wholeness which Wilber calls “differentiated oneness.” Simply put it is the bringing together of the oneness from which we have come and the individuality of our selfhood. Wholeness consists of remembering and honouring the oneness, while not diminishing the uniqueness of our individualities.
What Wilber is trying to get it is not that our ego is a bad thing but that we often allow our ego to be the centre, rather than serving the Centre.
Our resistance to letting our ego step aside and allowing God to be the centre of our life also is a part of our faith journey as a community. Over the last number of years I have begun to see the Christian path in new ways. Many of those I have shared with you. But this process of seeing our faith in new ways can be unnerving as well as exciting. As Presbyterians we are proud of our heritage and our ways of worshipping God and practicing our faith. Change comes slowly to us both personally and corporately. We want so much to get it right. Yet is it our calling to get it right?
When Newell was participating in a workshop with Rabbi Nahum Ward-Lev, he was struck by the approach of the rabbi to the Hebrew Scriptures. The rabbi did not see the Scriptures as a doctrinal treatise frozen in time to stand forever but rather he saw it as a story that is living and unfolding forever. He said that Judaism does not have doctrine, it has a story. As people study the Scriptures and ask questions of the story, the story is allowed to speak anew.
Our reconnection to God in the unconscious is to take a journey that will help us to become less rigid and focused on getting the story right and more focused on experiencing the story for our time. How are we in this generation to speak of the God we know, of the one known as Jesus, the Son of God and of the Spirit that dwells within us?
Those questions cannot be answered fully today – perhaps they never will and never should be. Perhaps we are just beginning to discover that the path we have chosen to take with God is just that. It is a path, a journey and not a destination. Perhaps we will be able to free ourselves more from the constraints of the past and seek for the life we are to have with God and each other in this moment in time. Perhaps we will judge less the ways of those who came before us and seek more to be faithful to those who are with us today. May our faith not be just words from the past but a story that is written today and every day to come.
AMEN